A review is only worth reading if you know how it was produced. This page sets out what we look at when we evaluate a web host, in what order, and where the limits of our knowledge are.
We would rather publish a smaller number of reviews we can defend than cover every host on the market thinly.
What we evaluate
1. True cost over three years, not the headline price
Shared hosting is sold on an introductory rate that typically applies to the first term only. Renewal is frequently two to four times higher. For every provider we work out what you pay across a realistic three-year ownership period, including:
- The introductory rate and the term length required to get it
- The renewal rate once that term ends
- Whether domain registration is genuinely free or free for year one only
- Whether SSL, backups, email, migration and staging are included or charged as add-ons
- Refund window and what is excluded from it
2. Performance
Two things matter and they are different: how fast a page is served, and how reliably it is served at all. We look at server response time, the underlying hardware and storage type, which PHP versions are offered, what caching is available at the server level, and whether a CDN is included. Where a provider publishes an uptime commitment, we report what the guarantee is and, importantly, what compensation it actually entitles you to, which is often far less than the number suggests.
3. Support quality
Support is the feature you do not care about until you desperately do. We look at which channels exist, the hours they are staffed, whether you reach someone able to make a change or only someone able to read a script, and how the provider handles the specific situations that go wrong most often: a site down, a migration gone bad, a suspected compromise.
4. Migration and exit
How easy is it to get in, and how easy is it to get out again. Whether migration is free, whether it is done for you or by you, whether there are limits on the number of sites, and whether you can take a full backup of your own site without asking permission. A host that makes leaving difficult is a host to be cautious about.
5. Security and control
Included SSL, automated backups and their retention period, whether you can restore a backup yourself, malware scanning, two-factor authentication on the account, and how much of the stack you are permitted to configure.
6. What real customers report
Marketing pages describe the intended experience. Support forums, review platforms and complaint threads describe the actual one. We read the negative reviews specifically, looking for patterns rather than isolated bad days, and we weight recent reports more heavily because hosting companies change hands and standards drift.
How we handle the limits of what we know
This is the part most review sites leave out, so we will be direct about it.
- Where a figure comes from our own use of a product, we say so.
- Where it comes from the provider’s own documentation or pricing pages, we say that instead. Provider claims are reported as claims, not as findings.
- Where it comes from aggregated user reports, we say that, and we do not present it as measurement.
- We do not publish invented benchmark numbers. If we have not measured something, there will be no number.
How money affects this
We earn commission when readers buy hosting through our links, which is set out in full in our Affiliate Disclosure. Commission determines who can pay us. It does not determine rankings, ratings, or what we write about a provider’s weaknesses. No provider reviews our content before publication.
Keeping reviews current
Hosting prices and features change without notice, and a review that was accurate last year may be misleading today. We date every review, revisit pricing periodically, and note material changes rather than editing quietly. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.